


We Will Get There When We Get There

by ectotherm



Category: Alice Isn't Dead (Podcast)
Genre: Backstory, F/F, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 04:50:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8876677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ectotherm/pseuds/ectotherm
Summary: Alice leaves.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [saintofbeasts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saintofbeasts/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! I hope it's a good one!
> 
> For detailed warnings see notes at the end. Thank you to A and H for looking this over.

Everywhere I look, people are crying, shell-shocked, or just plain confused. A young couple has cracked open their luggage, and haggard edges of metal poke out in place of personal effects. The plane crashed last month. The wreckage was found this morning, in place of a plane load full of people's carefully packed holiday mementos and business suits. 

It’s a Tuesday.

"What is this? Where the fuck is my stuff?" a man yells. He’s the one point of thrashing movement in an otherwise stoic crowd. Even the conveyor belts are regular, processional. There's always a man yelling, Keisha. What's going on. Don't touch me. I swear to God, lady. _Fuck_ , they say, pointing a finger in your face. _Fuck you_.

"Please, sir—" someone says. Airport personnel are doing their best to keep people calm. I'm just watching. I already called it in. There's nothing dangerous here; just a cruel trick played on hurting people where the universe thinks nobody important is watching. Minimum response will do. My phone buzzes in my pocket and one of the women nearest to me startles. She probably knew someone on the plane. You can tell the locals from the folks just passing through by their expressions. Grief has a way of showing through your skin, reaching out with empty hands when your eyes meet someone else’s. 

"Jesus, Leo, where have you been," I say, pressing the phone to my ear and darting glances up to make sure nobody hears. "I'm crawling out of my skin here—"

"Alice," Nelson says, cutting me off. I start. Busy playing boss to a hundred or so people, she doesn't usually handle my end of things, and it definitely wasn't her voice I was expecting to hear. "I need you in Georgia."

"Georgia?" I'm in fucking Iowa. "I'm in Iowa."

"Yeah, yeah," she drawls on the phone. "But I need you back at the office. Today."

"I don't get it. I'm on the airport job. I was waiting to call in backup." The same woman looks at me again from across the atrium with a little suspicion or annoyance now, it’s hard to say. "Hold on," I say. I move further away from the conveyor belts, straight back to the exits, near the body scanners. 

"So, you're at the airport," she says. "Catch a plane." The line clicks dead.

*

"Alice. Come in."

Nelson's office is big, but it's packed with so much furniture it feels as small as the cubicles in communications. It's not even nice furniture, just rusting filing cabinets and the kind of couches they have in the waiting room at the local clinic. It’s not that they’re ugly, they’re just not nice, either. Nobody sits down long enough to help them look loved. Every single surface in the office is littered with files detailing every crude and inexplicable thing that’s happened across the country for the last twenty years. 

"How was your flight?" she asks, not looking up from her desk until my carry-on hits the carpet with a dull thud.

"Fine," I answer, distracted. Her desk is empty save a single file. I recognize it, the color, the particular tea stain in the top left corner, and the series of colored dots indicating the nature of the event described inside. Missing persons, presumed homicide. Teenage daughter, prime suspect: never located. It’s got my name on it, capital letters printed in Nelson’s neat hand. 

“Close the door, please."

Turning the door handle feels like walking across the cemetery lawn to go to a funeral. I’ve seen this folder twice. Once when it was compiled and once when I refused to take a job. 

“Coffee?” Nelson asks, as if the thing my hammering heart most urgently needs is fucking coffee. I think about your breathing exercises, Keisha. Push my feet against the carpet. Notice the feeling of the cuff of my jeans against my ankle, my curly hair just whispering past my ear, the sounds of evening Atlanta traffic far beyond the confines of the building. 

“What’s this about, Nelson?” 

Nelson smiles at me. She's older than me, and her teeth are yellowing. Not—not _that_ yellow, though. "You look good, Alice." I’m still not sure what game we’re playing today but I definitely do not look good. The flight wasn’t long but it still involved being crammed in a plane with a bunch of disgruntled strangers. The van we had on the airport job is still tucked away at the motel with Leo, so there was also an hour long wait at Hartsfield-Jackson for some Bay and Creek underling to come pick me up. I’m sure I look like hell. I don’t really care.

I clench my teeth together. 

“Why is my file on your desk?”

“How long have you been married, Alice?” Nelson asks, opening the file. 

Oh, _fuck_.

She pulls a pack of cigarettes out of a drawer and lights one, dropping ash right on the photo of me as a sixteen year old, scared witless and covered in god knows what. 

“Two years,” I answer, truthfully. There’s no use worrying about how she’ll react to defiance, given the circumstances. 

She takes a drag, then slams the folder shut. Slides it over to me.

“God damn it, Alice.” 

“You’re married,” I say, opening the folder to the spread of my parents’ kitchen, the night they disappeared. Nelson showed up before the cops. 

“I didn’t kill my parents.”

“Neither did I,” I snap.

“I know that,” Nelson says, pressing the end of the cigarette down into an ashtray. “Does she?” She pulls out a photo, pushes it across the desk to join the file. It’s us. The photo was taken at a damn monster truck rally, of all things. You were wearing that baseball cap you love so much, the one that makes you look like a fraternity kid or a truck driver. Neither of us knew we were being photographed. You’re looking at me with such tenderness, Keisha, and I’m grinning like mad. I exhale, slowly. 

“She doesn’t know,” I answer. I’m talking about my parents, but god, the things you don’t know, Keisha. I thought about telling you, so many times. I thought about running away with you, more than we did already, coming clean about the vacations, the phone calls, the office renovations. We could do what I do at Bay and Creek, but answer to no one. No one holding our lives above our heads with folders full of secrets. 

“Alice,” Nelson says, gently for once. “You have to leave.” I clutch at the edges of the photograph. “You’re putting her right in the middle of harm’s way.” 

“I could tell her,” I say, hot tears building around my eyes. 

Nelson holds out her hand for me to return the folder, the photograph. 

“You won’t.”

*

“ _Alice, I love you to bits but I wish you’d turn your phone off silent sometimes. You are not going to believe what a piece of utter, putrid shit my day was. I’m ordering a pizza for dinner, and I was thinking, you know . . . we could totally do that. Make pizza, deliver pizza, maybe occasionally eat pizza. So I guess I’m calling to ask if you want to quit your job with me and go all in on a pizza oven. Just kidding. Call me back. I love you. I’ll see you at home_.”

*

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings for mild horror and plane crashes.


End file.
